Vulnerabilities in a Wetter World : A study on migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change, with under-five mortality as an intermediating variable.

Sammanfattning: This thesis strives to examine firstly if migration is a significant adaptation strategy to the experience of abundant precipitation, and secondly whether under-five mortality works attenuating or enhancing when being an intermediating factor. With cross-country panel data for precipitation and migration percentage for 169 countries over the world for the time period 1950-2005, a fixed effect model has been created for both parts of the analysis — in the first one to estimate the effects of abundant precipitation on migration flows, and in the second one to examine if and how the mortality rates of children under the age of five works as driver on the effect between abundant precipitation and migration. The results illustrated a positive and significant effect of precipitation on migration when same-year data was used. For the five-year lag data and the ten-year lag data, the null hypothesis which indicates that there is no relationship between the variables could not be rejected, but there were still results that indicated that the migration goes up in a five-year perspective and decreases in a ten-year perspective. The results from the first part of the analysis do not illustrate enormous effects. For the second part of the analysis, results show that the effect of precipitation on under-five mortality does, in contrary to the stated hypothesis, implicate an attenuation as opposed to an enhancement of the effect of precipitation on migration. Due to low precision and non-significant results, it is not possible to determine how exactly the effects are directly affecting each other. This thesis has however helped to prove that one can reject that the effects are strongly enhancing each other.